In communication networks, packet loss and jitter are the primary source of poor performance in real-time communications, such as voice and video communications. This problem is further exacerbated when the number of packets for these real-time communications exceeds a Service Level Agreement (SLA) threshold. In these cases, packets that are in excess of the SLA are dropped by the service provider. This makes real-time communications even more vulnerable to packet loss.
In these situations, other types of bandwidth defined by the SLA may not be fully utilized. For example, during peak network traffic periods, audio traffic may be exceeding the SLA while video traffic and data traffic are not exceeding the SLA. What is needed is a solution to effectively identify where packet loss and jitter are affecting signal quality by utilizing different solutions to account for packet loss.